


Social Circle

by confusedkayt



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Implied abuse atmosphere of the Circles, Poor Little Rich Boy, This is frankly quite bleak, cw: Templars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 04:35:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10153775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confusedkayt/pseuds/confusedkayt
Summary: A young Trevelyan is awfully lonely in the Circle between his infrequent visits home.Inspired by my Edraid Trevelyan's conversation with Josephine wherein he reveals that his parents paid bribes to allow him to visit home from the Circle from time to time, as well as the general... lack of social acumen Trevelyan often seems to display.I think Josephine conversation is meant to imply that the Ostwick Circle was considerably more lax than the "worst case scenarios" we'd been shown at Kinloch and Kirkwall, but I couldn't help but think that the Circles as structured guarantee Templar abuses.  The Trevelyan bribes might have landed the future Inquisitor better treatment and the occasional visit home, but special privileges when your peers suffer more than you are not psychologically or socially costless.   Add that together with the starting premise that this relatively privileged Circle mage was nevertheless motivated to join and fight in a messy rebellion, and the general vibe I got that Trevelyan had not had much chance to really learn to socialize...  A bit bleak, really.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HollowLand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HollowLand/gifts).



> WARNINGS: The general atmosphere of abuse that pervades the Circles is strongly alluded to here. The POV character hasn't experienced it directly, but I think there are disturbing atmospherics and the distinct implication that others have been directly harmed by the Templars.

It’s so quiet on the top floor of the tower. Not that he misses Hugo Drax’s constant sniveling, but it is… strange, the way Edraid’s footsteps echo up here, now, with nothing to compete with them. Ser Regon and Ser Jasper are still there, always, but they don’t smile and joke like they used to. That’s fine, more than fine - he’s fourteen now, a man, more or less, not a baby wanting for stories and games and they’re polite but there’s a… hardness to them, some kind of twitchy change that rubs the wrong way and he’s got nothing but time to notice it. A man can only read the same old textbooks for so many hours per day.

And it’s all reading, now, or very nearly. It used to be more fun. The novel freedom of robes instead of binding doublets and stiff collars, the sheer bloody fun of learning how to point all of the lightning that crackles from his stomach through every inch of him, the rush of releasing it in a beautiful blue storm instead of cramming it down to burn inside the way his mother always wanted. Dance lessons much more fun than the waltzes he’d always hated practicing back home, four others learning to step-twirl-BOOM in unison with him. They’d help the armies, one day, and if he’d always thought he’d ride a tall brown horse like his father’s to do it, really, wasn't this much more _fun?_

Or it would have been. There’s no more dancing, now, not for him. Now it’s all control, control, control and it sounds so much like his mother that he can’t help but miss her like the child he isn’t, anymore.

It never used to be like this. Hannah’s got a hunched set to her shoulders that wasn’t there before, and she and Emily and even Stewart go all quiet when he sits down at the table with them for lunch. They think he hasn’t seen them whispering in stairwells and dark corners of the library, thick as thieves and he hasn’t done anything, really, to warrant being cut right out like this.

They’re jealous, that’s all. It’s not _his_ fault their parents don’t want them home for Satinalia. It is absolutely their fault that they won’t take the sweets she wraps up in little bundles for him to give to his particular friends. They never used to be too good for them, for him, but whatever they’ve got going on lately doesn’t include him or his sweets and they can stuff it.

Maybe that’s not quite fair. He’s noticed, don’t think he hasn’t, the way the Templars have taken to steering them all away from his tower, his lessons, _him._ It’s mother’s doing, he’s sure of it. He’ll never live down the sheer humiliation of the way she’d dragged him back, personally, three days of press-lipped silence in a carriage over bumpy roads, only to loose her voice hard enough to ring the rafters and all because of one little singe on the practice fields that might have, possibly, scarred. Just a little. The messengers haven’t ceased since, once a week like clockwork. He can see them out the window. People he knows, people who knew him since he was born, strolling up in the family livery but not so much as a minute’s visit to him. He tried to tell her, last time - it’s embarrassing, really, and probably beneath their family, doesn’t she think, _Hugo’s_ parents never write and they’re third tier nobility _at best_ \- but she’d made such a face, clenched teeth and for a moment he was sure she was going to _cry_ and that was the end of that.

So this, apparently, is how it now will be. He’ll rot in the stupid top floor of the stupid tower and the only people who will ever speak to him again are the mean senior enchanters and the Chantry sisters who only speak to nag at him for his too-slow cadence when he recites the Chant. If it’s a plot to make him homesick, it’s working. Two weeks, is all, two weeks until he can leave this quiet place for the noise of the Keep on a feastday that is almost, almost, almost enough to feel like he’s really coming home.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm adding a shout-out as well as a dedication to my pal HollowLand. I'm so lucky that HollowLand thought I'd be interested in Dragon Age but knew I'd never get it together to learn complex gameplay mechanics, and so generously offered to play through ALL THREE DA games with me. HollowLand did all of the thankless hard stuff - fighting, equipping, moving around - and let me make all the soap opera decisions. I can't even say how grateful and lucky I am.
> 
> Inquisition was especially interesting because... I'm not sure if it was the voice acting, or something in the seeds of our character creation, or what, but it took some WORK to learn to like Edraid Trevelyan. He's just not as charismatic as Hawke, or as heroic as Cousland. The way we played him had him starting as sort of a Tony Stark type without the native charm that would let him get away with that nonsense. He had a hell of a growth arc (AND I think it's awfully rich to expect a mage rebellion leader to just cheerfully befriend/work with a bunch of hostile Templar-aligned people who start by literally imprisoning and charging him!) Now, as I hope is apparent in this little story, I am very fond.


End file.
